It doesn't surprise me when someone says, like David Einstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, that there's no need for a Mac user to run anti-virus software. Though the most usual reason I see given is that there aren't any Mac viruses. (There are, but nowadays the main reason to run anti-malware on any platform

You may have gathered from some of the blogs published here last year that i'm not biggest fan of the BBC's "Click" programme. I regard the Beeb's forays into buying botnets and stolen credit card details and making active use of them as at best naive. I agree that people need to be aware of such issues,

As our December ThreatSense report (now available at http://www.eset.com/threat-center/threat_trends/Global_Threat_Trends_December_2009.pdf) was not only the last of the year but the last of the decade, it's rather longer and more detailed than usual, including a look back at the last 12 months. I suppose we could have gone back over the whole decade, but I have to

Social networking sites have become living biographies of people and may set them up for social engineering attacks. From time to time I enjoy looking to see what I can find out about people who send question to me using the AskESET@eset.com address. I won’t ever name names, but I wanted to share one example.

[Update: I had a couple of machine crashes while I was writing this, and only just realized that a pointer to Allan Dyer's excellent article at http://articles.yuikee.com.hk/newsletter/2009/12/a.html hadn't survived to the final version. Which is a pity, because it's very relevant, and well worth reading.] Over the weekend, I posted a blog on the AVIEN site

Will the Motorola Droid be the next malware-victimized smartphone? Well, it's a bit early to make a claim like that, but the fact that it's been rooted (an analogous process to jailbreaking on the iPhone and iPod Touch) in order to allow end-users to install unapproved applications, puts the platform one step nearer. See the

I learned a new word today. "Glurge", according to snopes.com, an essential resource when checking the validity of dubious chain letters, glurge is the sending of inspirational (and supposedly true) tales … that often … undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering a "true story". I came across

Specifically spear-phishing, where the target is deliberately selected, as opposed to a random untargeted attack. An article at Dark Reading.com discusses the entirely unsurprising results of a test that concluded that the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Palm have essentially no protection against spear-phishing attacks. http://www.darkreading.com/insiderthreat/security/app-security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221100150&cid=nl_DR_WEEKLY_T LinkedIn was used as the service to send a fake invitation

I came across an interesting article today on "Breaking the conventional scheme of infection" at the evil fingers blog site. Actually, it’s by my colleague in Argentinia, ESET Latin America Security Analyst, Jorge Mieres, but I didn’t realize that at first. (The original blog is in Spanish, and if your command of that language is

Update: Lysa Myers, of West Coast Labs, has confirmed that she knows of a number of people who’ve used the application and didn’t see anything fishy happening. It did offer to send emails outside Facebook but didn’t insist on it, so it’s hard to see where the messages from unapproved contacts are coming from. I’ll

(1) Websense, our neighbour in San Diego, has reported a fake anti-malware scam centred on Labor Day social engineering. The scam uses malicious SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, sometimes referred to as index hijacking or SEO poisoning, to misdirect potential victims. When the victim uses Google to search for Labor Day sales (apparently these are very

I forwarded this to myself from another account yesterday because I thought it was one of the laziest 419 scam messages I’d ever seen. From: British Tobacco Company Sent: 27 August 2009 19:46 Subject: Contact Mr Paul Adams Congratulations! Your e-mail ID was among the selected lucky winners of £1,000.000.00 GBP in our BRITISH TOBACCO

There’s been a certain amount of buzz in the past couple of days about messages claiming to link to Wire Transfer information, but actually related to a Trojan commonly called Delf or Doneltart. ESET is detecting the examples we’ve been seeing as a variant of Win32/TrojanDownloader.Delf.OZG. The messages generally look something like this (at least,

Over the weekend our colleagues at ESET Latin America found that Slideshare was being used to spread malware. As they haven’t found much information on the web about this, Sebastián Bortnik blogged today about what they found. (Errors in translation and interpretation should be attributed to David Harley!) I’ve added some thoughts and some content

We know that spam works: well, it works well enough for spammers to keep devoting time and money into pumping sewage into the arteries of the internet. The interesting question is why does it work? The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), a global coalition of network operators and messaging providers who do some vital work

SC Magazine in the UK picked up on our Global Threat Report for June, based on statistics that derive from our ThreatSense.Net® threat-monitoring technology. Thanks, Dan: when you do as much writing as I do, it’s comforting to know that someone is reading it. ;-) I thought, though, I’d develop some thoughts on a topic arising

The estimable Gadi Evron has posted an article at DarkReading about a dialogue he was caught up in on Facebook. One of his contacts popped up in a Facebook Chat window and told him how she’d been been held at gunpoint and robbed in London, losing her credit card, cash and mobile phone. Well, having

I’d like to say thanks to Sean, who commented on my first blog on Orbasoft blog spam (don’t miss the later blog!) as follows: "These people are still not telling the truth. This software has been tested several times in the last few days and has been verified as a Rogue. It is on average detecting

When I first went to university at the end of the 1960s (yes, I really am that old, though not quite old enough to be of that generation that only remembers that decade through a haze of psychedelic phenomena), my choice of social sciences was regarded as somewhat fluffy. It was the age of "the

I haven’t commented on the recent flurry of interest in the Mac botnet issue, having already mentioned it a few weeks ago here. It’s not as though anyone has shown much interest in the technical aspects, such as the interesting use of the Authorization Services APIs to trick the victim into authorizing installation. Just one of